


Eyes Unchanged

by Astroskylark



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-05
Updated: 2011-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-19 01:06:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astroskylark/pseuds/Astroskylark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Throughout his travels, the Doctor never changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forgetting

_The lights in the theatre spun of their own accord, separate from the turning of the world and the revolution of time._

He could pretend to forget in such a place, where the world didn’t turn beneath him and nothing mattered except the spinning of the sky and the twinkling of stars that had burned out a billion years ago. He could pretend to stay still, running on a foreign world beneath alien stars. He could pretend to hear only the silence while he listened to the sound of his own screams lost among those of so many others. He could pretend not to be alone on a desolate world orbiting a dead star in a galaxy within which life never evolved.

He could pretend that he didn’t have to pretend. He could allow himself to stop thinking of all the people he hadn’t been able to save, all the worlds that no longer turned at his command, all the dark stars dead because of him, all the galaxies turned to dust and all the universes that never existed because he’d made a mistake.

He could never stop thinking for long, though, because he’d always go slightly insane, because he’d lose everything that grounded someone who never stayed on one world long enough to say goodbye. He couldn’t let himself go because he knew he was needed. Because even if he broke everything he touched, there wouldn’t be anything to break if he didn’t reach out.


	2. I Still Love You

_Day turned to dusk and dusk to night as the temple of words and sounds oversaw the stars fading into existence in the darkening sky._

The Doctor always taught his companions what they least wanted to know. He showed them the things they’d never wished to see because he needed to travel with someone as broken as himself. He taught them about themselves, showed them their limits and how far they were willing to go, what choices they weren’t able to make and which ones they were, and what made them human and tore them away from the rest of their kind.

They were forever fading in his mind, starting out as a ghost of what they could be and becoming real only after he’d lost them. Their echoes grew louder and louder until he could hardly hear himself think anymore, but he didn’t mind because it hurt too much to think anyway.

He loved all his companions, just never in the way they wanted him to. They were his best friends, his world, his savior when the echoes became too much and he needed to be saved from himself, the person he could turn to when it hurt too much to be all alone in the universe when once he had a whole world of people to call his family. It was never enough, though. It wasn’t enough for them that he held them on a pedestal and loved them more than anything else in existence. It wasn’t enough to keep them together when the worlds were trying to tear them apart, and it wasn’t enough to make them stay with him when he made them see all the beauty they could never see before destroyed.


	3. Rassilon Within His Circle Standing

_The colors of sunset streaked across the night, while the theatre stood still, a relic of the concepts that had fueled its construction, of the ancient arches and words borne of beauty whose origin is older still, of the people that had created a shrine of words and ideas and had built a cathedral to house their abstractions so they could amplify thoughts to create emotions and emotions to create something larger then themselves and bind the world together with a shared perception._

The Time Lords were the oldest and most powerful race in the universe because they’d been around forever, since the beginning of time. They were the Overseers of All that was to be overseen, the Guardians of the universe that guarded only their own gates, who took everything and gave nothing in return.

They’d been ancient with their first breath, their entire existence a perpetual sunset, but he’d been different. He had been the star burning brightly against the night. He’d made the Time Lords who they were, he’d been the one who made them more than a thought, more than an idea held in the minds of thinking beings, more than the Gods they were made to be.

He’d bound them together and set them free from the rusted chains of blood that confined them, with the power of words and the light of hope. He’d shown them the stars they lorded over, and they’d loved him for it. He’d made them what they were meant to be.

For every star shining brightly, there is a sun burning darkly, though. He’d known that, and so had his rival. They had made Gallifrey together, the favored child and the boy exiled from his home. They were the best of enemies and the best of friends, the dark star and the bright one, the Doctor and the Master.

Together, they ravaged the stars they’d taught their race to see. They tore through the universe, one ripping apart worlds and the other gluing them back together again. They lived to change what the other did, making the darkness into light and the light into darkness, to clean the filth and to dirty all that was good, to help the hurt and hurt everyone whole, to twist love into hate and to warp hate into love.

They never went too far. The good one never made the universe indestructible and the evil one made it irreparable. They sought to tip the balance and in doing so set the worlds right in their own ways, all the while watched over by the Time Lords looking on from their high tower gleaming golden in the sky, Rassilion within his circle standing.

They wove themselves and their people into the universe they had been created to stand above, blending the colors and lights of a thousand million suns together to destroy and build back up again.

They taught the Time Lords, the cheaters of death, that the purpose of life is to die so that others may live. They built circles within their minds out of lines and made those circles made out of lines into spheres and gave those spheres made of circles made of lines continuity, spreading their lines and circles and spheres across the dimensions, across the universes, across time and across space.

The two Time Lord children, the Doctor and the Master, remade the Time Lords by showing them infinity and dividing eternity. The Doctor had shown them the relics of the future and the Master had shown them the ruins of the past.


	4. Far Too Far and Further

_The lights in the theatre spun wildly in the imperfect night, separate from time and the corruption that accompanies the passing of the years, standing testament to the power the minds of people have against the forces of the world._

The children of Gallifrey had taught their people to make war. The Last Great Time War had gone too far, far too far. It had torn apart the night so no one could put it together again, not in all the time they didn’t have or all the time in the universe they’d wasted. It had ripped apart the fabric of the universe, undone all the threads that had bound the Time Lords to the universe they were made to protect.

The Doctor had sacrificed everything to try to help. He’d loved his race more than anything. In the end, that had been all that had mattered, that he’d loved them enough to save them from themselves. He had known what he was doing when he fired the weapon. He knew it wouldn’t just kill the Daleks. He’d known, too, that his people had become something else than what he’d remade them to be, but the most important thing is that he’d known it wasn’t his fault.

The Master could have stopped the War too, but he and the Doctor become something else than what they’d made themselves to be as well. They’d become something slightly more than the best of enemies and the best of friends, something slightly less, something decidedly different. The Doctor had killed the Master before he’d fired the weapon, because he hadn’t wanted the other to have the blood of two races on his hands for the rest of his lives. The Master would have done the same for him had he had the chance.

He’d died too, but his TARDIS had saved him, the loyal old ship in which he had once traveled the universe within. It had become something else too, something less like a timeship and more like a prison. He no longer traveled the universe within her. He spent out his sentence as the killer of his kind there, burned away the days with the careless that he’d once banished from his home world.

He’d gone to the first world to watch the sunset, not by choice, but because his loyal old ship hadn’t wanted to go anywhere else. It had broken both his hearts before they’d had a chance to beat, seeing the last sunset of the first world with the dead body of his best friend, his best enemy, and the ship that had just become his prison.

He’d laid there for a while, feeling the world turn under him and watching the light bleed from a world that wasn’t his own for the first time, for the last time, holding the lifeless hand of a man that had torn the skies from countless worlds and would have sacrificed everything for him at the same time. He’d willed the world to stop turning, and for the briefest of seconds, it had stilled. He’d breathed and the moment was lost, and the first world spun faster towards its final moments, because of him.

He’d watched the light of the dying star spinning in the night as he’d left alone. He had left the Master’s body on the world with a 109th century spaceship and a TARDIS coral, because they hadn’t changed enough to see the stars together, only enough not to try to change them apart.


	5. Somewhere Within

_The words echo somewhere within, and further away, in another far-away time, words ring in the beams._

He’d used the power to words to change his people into something worth saving. The same power had been the reason he couldn’t save them. When before he had only ever needed to travel far away, he now wanted to run further. He’d heard the echo of the words he’d used and the words they’d used overlaid and intricately interweaved, for that was the one thing he could never run from.


	6. The Worst Thing

_The theatre builds a bridge between now and then, throwing out of tendrils of connectedness and chasing away the shadows that threaten to consume the past, armed with remembrance and the concepts the temple of words and ideas was once built upon in the far-off time where a bridge has yet to be constructed._

He’d gone to Gallifrey once after its destruction, before it had formed. He’d watched it form out of the dust, and then he’d gone to the same place fourteen billion years later, to the ashes of the world that had given him life, to which he’d given life in turn. He threw a TARDIS key into the hearts of each star, and he’d sworn that he’d never forget, that he’d spread the legend of Gallifrey across the stars, that he’d keep it alive forever and ever.

He’d told everyone that would listen of the Time Lords, the oldest and mightiest race in the universe. He’d told them of Gallifrey and the ways of old, of a burnt orange sky and red grass swaying under the wind and the silver leaves that shone in the light of the twin suns. He’d told them that Gallifrey could never be just a story.

He’d told them stories of how the Time Lords were the reason all the stars burned in the sky, of how they’d been appointed the Guardians of the universe, the Overseers of All before time, of how they’d chased away all the shadows that fell where none should, how they’d woven themselves into the universe across time, and of how they’d given up everything so that something, anything at all, could remain. Then he’d told them that he was Last of the Time Lords and they’d looked into his eyes and seen the whole of space and time, all the ever was or ever would be, all that could be and all that must not. They’d felt the world turn under them and then they’d felt it cease because they’d had to look away.

The worst thing was that he knew what he was doing.


	7. Eyes Unchanged

_The lights in the theatre spun of their own accord, separate from the turning of the world and the revolution of time, watching through the years with eyes unchanged._

Even through all his journeys, he never changed. He still saw the world through the eyes that had taught his people to see, after all the years that passed by unheeded, after all the stolen moments he’d taken from time, after all the years he’d spent running, after all the worlds he saw burn through eyes unchanged.


End file.
